Technological, Social, and Sustainable Systems
Brad Allenby
Fall 2009
FSE 194
Course Objectives: To introduce students to the importance and role of technological,
social, and sustainable systems in the modern world, which is increasingly characterized
by integrated human/natural/built complex adaptive systems at local, regional and global
scales. Emphasis will be on characteristics and fundamentals of technology systems;
complex adaptive systems behavior and evolution; and associated cultural, ethical, and
managerial behaviors, with a focus on the need for multidisciplinary approaches; and
current patterns in technological evolution. The course provides a framework for the
theory and practice of sustainable engineering.
At the end of the course, students should be able to:
1. Explain the importance of technology and technological systems;
2. Explain the social and environmental implications of design, construction,
operation, and management of technology systems;
3. Identify and explain critical principles of complexity and complex systems; and
4. Be able to use these concepts and principles to explore a topic of their choice in a
systemic and integrated way in their term paper.
In addition to domain-specific goals, this course is also intended to help students:
1. Learn to communicate in short essay form and in small group discussions;
2. Understand issues and impacts associated with technology systems and emerging
technologies at a broad cultural and geographic scale extending across urban,
regional, national and global scales; and
3. Understand the need and develop the capability to participate in lifelong learning.
In terms of ABET criteria, the course will enable students to:
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
Understand professional and ethical issues in the context of engineered and earth
systems;
Learn to communicate in short essay form;
Understand issues and impacts of engineering solutions at a broad cultural and
geographic scale extending across urban, regional, national and global scales;
Understand the need and develop the capability to participate in lifelong learning;
and,
Take into consideration contemporary issues and environmental impacts in civil
and environmental engineering practices.
Introduction: The Industrial Revolution and continuing dramatic and accelerating
changes in economic, technological, and cultural systems has fundamentally changed the
way people live, relate to each other, and affect natural and built systems. In fact, many
scientists are increasingly referring to our modern period era as the “Anthropocene,”
which can be roughly translated as the Age of Humans. Moreover, the accelerating pace
of technological evolution – particularly the coming convergence of nanotechnology,
biotechnology, robotics, information and communication technology (ICT), and cognitive
sciences – will both reinforce the human domination of the dynamics of natural systems,
and pose significant challenges to existing cultural and ethical norms and patterns. Thus,
it is not possible to understand the modern world, and to make intelligent choices about
the future, without some understanding of technological systems and emerging
technologies, and the complex systems of which they are a part.
Accordingly, this course will provide students with an introduction to technology
and complex systems, and explore some of the implications of technology for
sustainability. It will also introduce students to the implications of understanding the
Earth as a terraformed planet, and the technological, economic and cultural patterns that
have contributed to its evolution. The potential operational, cultural and ethical
implications of future evolutionary pathways will be explored, with emphasis on the
challenges they pose and the role of technological systems in both creating, and helping
to address, such challenges.
The course will consist of 1.5 hours of lecture, and 1.5 hours of discussion in
small groups with the TA’s, each week, except where otherwise noted. The course grade
will consist of three components: class participation; a homework component which will
primarily reflect short essays on class topics; and a term paper.
Homework will be a one page, 1.5 spaced, essay each week on the topic assigned for that
week. It will be due the second class of each week at the beginning of class, where it will
be collected by the TA and cross-edited by the students. The reading assignment for each
week includes reviewing the slide package for the next week’s class prior to class.
Grading:
Class participation: 30%
Homework: 35%
Each missing or late paper is minus 5%
Failure to meet minimum quality standards is minus 3%
Term paper: 35%, of which
Grasp and use of course concepts (e.g., complexity, technology
systems): 30%
Organization, structure, and persuasiveness 30%
Proper format 20%
Presentation (e.g., no typos, complete sentences) 20%.
Primary Texts:
1. Grubler, Technology and Global Change
2. Allenby, Theory and Practice of Sustainable Engineering
3. Card, Ender’s Game
4. Florman, The Existential Pleasure of Engineering
Weekly Schedule (note that the topic of the week’s lecture is given for each week; the
second session of each week will consist of a small seminar where a) the weekly essays
will be collected by the TA and handed out randomly for cross grading, with students
commenting on style and substantive content of each essay in a mutually supportive
learning environment; b) additional open discussion of issues raised by the weekly
lecture; and c) additional instruction in writing, speaking, and learning skills).
Week 1: Welcome to the Anthropocene: a discussion of the increasing impact of humans
on the world, including information on demographic trends (urbanization, population
growth, per capita material, energy, and water consumption), global economic history,
natural cycles (especially C and N), and how they interact in various systems, such as
biofuels as response to global climate change.
Reading: Chapter 1, Allenby; slide package (in this and all subsequent weeks).
Homework (to be handed in at TA session on week 1): Essay: In what major
ways does the world we live in now differ from the world 200 years ago?
Week 2: Important Themes of the Human Earth: A number of general themes are
important for understanding the world as it now exists, and as providing context for
engineering and managing technology today. These include the criticality of technology
as a contributor to, and shaper of, accelerating economic, environmental, social, and
cultural evolution; the increasing information density and complexity of the world as
many physical domains are re-defined into information structures (e.g., genetics and
bioengineering); and the growth of active information functionality within built
environments (e.g., the “cognitive city” is a complex of “smart” materials, “smart”
buildings, “smart” infrastructure, and “smart” integrated infrastructures). Moreover,
natural systems are increasingly integrated with human and built systems, and thus
become subject to their dynamics (e.g., reflexivity, intentionality); examples might
include genetic engineering and its commoditization through intellectual property law, or
carbon cycle and sulfur cycle management. Institutionally, the rapidly evolving
technological frontier creates significant social pressures; fundamentalism as a response
to modernity becomes increasingly powerful, and professionals and firms are being
charged by society with responsibility not just for their actions, but for their technology
systems (cf: Monsanto and genetically modified organisms). It thus becomes
increasingly possible that technological evolution will become discontinuous in terms of
cultural ability to adapt, especially with NBRIC evolution continuing to accelerate. This
is especially true as technological evolution functions to redefine what it means to be
human, and begins to reframe the human as a design space. Adaptation will be much
more difficult as well because foundational values and cultural constructs continue to
become contingent over much shorter time frames (swamp/wetlands; jungle/rainforest;
wilderness evil to good; natural/supernatural to natural/human). From a cultural and
political perspective, the bipolar order imposed by the Cold War has destabilized global
power relationships and, rather than being the “end of history” has unleashed even more
powerful conflict between, e.g., fundamentalism and modernity in Islam, Christianity,
Judaism, environmentalism, Hinduism, and elsewhere, and, some fear, potentially a
“clash of civilizations.” At the same time, the role of nation-state is changing profoundly,
leading to more diffuse power structures, different and more varied forms of community
(e.g., online social networks), and a loss of the traditional monopoly of the state on
military power (e.g., technologies of mass destruction have been democratized).
Reading: Chapter 2, Allenby; Grubler, chapters 1 and 2.
Homework: Essay: Why do you think scientists increasingly refer to our modern
era as the “Anthropcene”?
Week 3: Complexity, Contingency, and Accelerating Change: There are very important
differences between complex and simple systems. Simple systems are generally
intuitively understandable, and their dynamics, such as “cause and effect,” are relatively
easy to understand. The anthropogenic Earth, however, is characterized by complexity,
which can be thought of as including four forms of complexity: static complexity
(number of components and links among them); dynamic complexity (introduced by
features such as lag times and feedback loops that operate as a system moves through
time); “wicked” complexity, which comes into play as humans and their institutions get
involved; and scale complexity, as humans increasingly operate at the scale of regional
and global natural and built systems. These operate together to create radical
contingency in the modern world, as it becomes difficult to determine what assumptions
and institutions will remain valid over time. An important aspect of this contingency is
that it undermines many traditional ethical systems: ethical structures (macroethics)
appropriate for complex adaptive systems have not yet been developed.
Reading: Chapter 3, Allenby; Grubler, chapter 3.
Homework: Essay: What do you think are the most important differences
between complex and simple systems, and why?
Week 4: Sustainability. “Sustainability” was popularized as “sustainable development
by the Brundtland Commission in 1987, and has two basic themes: an emphasis on
environmental quality, and a demand for increased equality in wealth distribution within
and among generations. Despite its high popularity, it remains an ambiguous and
somewhat contentious concept, and difficult to translate into operational terms that are
easily translated into design and management of technology or earth systems. The
sustainability dialog also tends to be naïve, if not somewhat skeptical, of engineering and
technology, which leads to significant potential blind spots given the importance of
emerging technologies to the shape and dynamics of future social, economic, and
environmental systems. It is clear, however, that engineering and technology
management today requires a greater focus on the environmental, social, and cultural
dimensions of a design or project. Accordingly, much of sustainable engineering is, in
fact, learning to translate the mythic language of sustainability into methods and inputs
that can inform better engineering and technocratic decisions.
Reading: Chapter 4, Allenby; handouts on sustainability, Grubler, chapter 4.
Homework: You are the head of a design team that has been asked by your
marketing department to create a “sustainable cell phone.” Write a memorandum to your
boss explaining how you intend to do that.
Week 5: Homo Faber: Human History and Technology. It is not surprising that periods
of human development, such as “Neolithic” or “the Bronze Age,” have referred to the
dominant technologies of the time, because humans, their institutions, and their societies
have always been coupled, and indeed to some extent defined, by their technologies.
Indeed, since the Industrial Revolution economists have used the idea of “long waves” of
innovation, characterized by particular technology clusters such as coal and the steam
engine, or automobiles, to help understand not just technological evolution, but also
economic, social, and cultural evolution as well.
Reading: Chapter 5, Allenby; Grubler, chapters 5 and 6.
Homework: Essay: Why do you think technology clusters have institutional,
social and cultural effects, rather than just economic impacts?
Term paper topic due in seminar session
Week 6: Understanding Technology: Technologies have generic characteristics that tend
to be fairly common: for example, they may grow vigorously when young, but they slow
as they grow old and eventually even the most fundamental infrastructures are replaced.
They must be understood and framed as systems if fundamental change is desired: for
example, if plug in hybrids, and solar and wind renewables are to be introduced into a
developed economy, the timing will not be determined by how long it takes to build and
design them, but rather how long it will take to rebuild the grid to handle greater
variability of supply and a large demand spike. More broadly, many cultures have
developed technologies, sometimes independently of each other, but few cultures have
successfully made technology a core of their success. Part of the reason is that
technology is not just widgets, or software, but is also a social and cultural activity, and
thus can be inhibited or encouraged by different cultural patterns.
Reading: Allenby, chapter 6; Grubler, chapters 7 and 8.
Homework: Essay: Why should I need to worry about the grid if all I want to do
is buy a plug-in vehicle because it’s good for the environment?
Week 7: Case Studies in Technology Systems: case studies of three major technology
systems – automobiles, information and communication technology, and green chemistry
– will be presented. In each case, it is apparent that each level within a particular
technology offers its own unique challenges and opportunities for the sustainable
engineer or technology manager: manufacturing a cell phone has different social and
environmental issues associated with it than designing and operating a communications
network, which in turn raises different issues than the social implications of the services
platformed on the physical system. It is also apparent, however, that each technology, as
a system, is more complex and integrated than engineers, businesspeople, and
policymakers realize. This marks an important area where sustainable engineering offers
insights that can improve professional performance significantly.
Reading: Allenby, chapters 7-9.
Homework: Essay: How would you redefine “green chemistry” so that it would
be “sustainable chemistry”?
Week 8: The Power of Technology Systems: The Railroad. It is important to
understand how pervasive the changes that a major technology system can introduce
really are. Railroads are a good example. To begin with, networks such as railroad
require a uniform, precise system of time and a means of communication adequate to the
time cycle of the technology; railroad technology called forth “industrial time” and its
associated culture, as well as the telegraph. Railroad firms were far bigger than previous
commercial firms, and required far more capital; they thus created modern managerial
capitalism (modern accounting, planning, and administration systems), as well as modern
capital and financial markets. Environmentally, railroads transformed landscapes at all
scales: Chicago existed, and structured the Midwest economically and environmentally,
because of railroads. Like most major technological systems, railroads fundamentally
changed US economic and power structures, restructuring the economy from
local/regional business concentrations to trusts and monopolies as railroad infrastructure
created the possibility of exploiting scale economies of national markets. Railroads even
changed the fundamental worldview behind American culture, changing it from
Jeffersonian agrarianism, an Edenic teleology, to a technology-driven New Jerusalem, a
cultural schism that replays itself today in the continuing environmentalist challenge to
technology.
Reading: Allenby, Chapter 10; first half of science fiction book.
Homework: Essay: If you had lived in a small village in the United States in the
early 1800’s when the first railroad was built in your area, how many of the changes that
the railroad subsequently caused do you think you could have predicted?
Week 9: The Five Horsemen: NBRIC. The railroad, a core technological system for a
technology cluster, had major impacts even though it was just one technology system.
We are currently seeing not one, but five, foundational technology systems in a period of
accelerating evolution: nanotechnology, biotechnology, robotics, information and
communication technology, and cognitive science. These technologies in some ways are
the logical end of the chapter of human history that began with the Greeks 2500 years ago.
Nanotechnology extends human will and design to the atomic level. Biotechnology
extends it across the biosphere. ICT gives us the ability to create virtual worlds at will,
and facilitates a migration of functionality to information rather than physical structures.
Robotics and biotechnology merge the biological and technological realms, enabling
integration at the level of information systems. Cognitive sciences rationalize cognition,
and thus enable ever expanding cognitive networks which increasingly merge human and
technology systems. Consider, for example, of the way that Google ™ so dramatically
extends human memory, creating a cognitive system that includes not just the human
elements, but vast swaths of Net technology, or the way that many militaries are building
“augmented cognition” technologies, where technologies intended to scan the battlefield
for threats are integrated into each soldier’s cognitive systems. Current accelerating rates
of technological evolution are not only unprecedented; they have the effect of
dramatically extending the spaces within which humans can, intentionally and
unintentionally, impact existing systems and design new ones. In doing so, they not only
raise the level of complexity of systems that we must strive to understand. Because they
also give us rapidly increasing tools to design the human itself, they render contingent
much of what we have taken to be fixed.
Reading: Allenby, chapter 11; second half of science fiction book.
Homework: Essay: Compare Ender’s Game with the war in Iraq, with its heavy
reliance on robotic ground, sea, and air platforms. Do you still think Ender’s Game is
science fiction? Why or why not?
Week 10: The Engineer as Ethicist: Macroethics. From the viewpoint of the engineer
and the technologist, four important characteristics of the Anthropocene differentiate it
from the traditional human systems within which existing ethical structures have
developed. The first is that the earth systems characteristics of the Anthropocene are
neither “human” nor “natural,” but highly integrated composites of both. The second is
that, as a result, the dynamics of such Anthropogenic systems include the reflexivity and,
thus, unpredictability of human systems. Thirdly, these systems are highly
interconnected: managing global climate change is difficult precisely because the climate
system is tightly coupled to human economic and technological systems and their future
paths, to powerful cultural and ideological systems, and to other natural systems such as
the carbon and nitrogen cycles. Finally, technology systems are major vehicles by which
this complexity, integration, and unpredictability are created. Existing ethical systems
and many proposed principles such as the Precautionary Principle (don’t implement a
technology until you are sure the risks it poses will be less than the existing risks) are
inadequate to this level of unpredictability, requiring the sustainable engineer to be much
more sophisticated regarding the culture, ethical systems, and contingency of the
frameworks within which he or she operates.
Reading: Allenby, chapter 12, watch The Matrix (first film in series)
Homework: Essay: How do you know either reality in The Matrix is more “real”
than the other? And if someone in them can’t tell which is which, what do you think of
the morality of Neo’s decision to destroy the Matrix?
Week 11: The Engineer as Problem Solver: Systems Engineering. Systems engineering
in many cases is highly technical, but when considered at a project management level it
forms a structure within which the sustainable engineer or technologist can create
solutions that work in the real world. In general, it requires six steps: determine the
actual goals of the system, including clients and stakeholders; establish criteria for
ranking alternatives (these may be numerical or qualitative); develop alternative solutions
(including technological, functional, and long-term structural alternatives); rank the
alternatives, including in the process nonperformance and non-quantitative
considerations; iterate on both implementation and system response (learning process);
and implement, usually as a continuing process in the case of complex system
management. Adaptive management, a similar process developed for design and
management of complex resource regimes such as fisheries, forests, and watersheds,
provides similar guidance, and should be part of the toolbox of the sustainable engineer.
Reading: Allenby, chapter 13; Florman, chapters 1-3.
Homework: You have just been assigned operational responsibility for the
Florida Everglades as a regional system. Write a memorandum to the Governor of
Florida to identify your goals, clients, and stakeholders.
Week 12: The Engineer and the Environment: Industrial Ecology and Life Cycle
Assessment. Industrial ecology, a relatively new field, is the objective, multidisciplinary
study of industrial and economic systems and their linkages with fundamental natural
systems. It incorporates, among other things, research involving energy supply and use,
new materials, new technologies and technological systems, basic sciences, economics,
law, management, and social sciences. Although still in the development stage, it
provides the theoretical scientific basis upon which understanding, and reasoned
improvement, of current practices can be based. Industrial ecology focuses on long term
habitability rather than short term or ad hoc approaches, attempting to understand
anthropogenic disruption to fundamental natural systems and cycles rather than just
responding to localized perturbations. In general, it focuses on concerns that are of
regional and global scope, persistent and difficult to manage, and tend to be long term.
Typical industrial ecology approaches include mass-flow analysis to understand energy
and material flows through economic and environmental systems, and the linkages
among them; popular tools based on this approach include life cycle analysis, or LCA. It
is important to recognize that industrial ecology and associated practices in general
continues to exhibit a strong bias towards the environmental domain, in part reflecting
their origin in environmental engineering and science, and in part reflecting the
complexity and strong normative dimensions of social issues, which make them much
harder for engineers to quantify and evaluate.
Reading: Allenby, chapter 14 and 15; Florman, chapters 4-6.
Homework: Essay: What is the difference between an industrial ecology and
sustainable engineering approach to designing an automobile?
Term paper due in seminar
Week 13: Sustainable Engineering Case Studies: Lead in Electronics Solder,
Engineering the Everglades, and Running a Mining Megacomplex. Three case studies
demonstrate the complexities of sustainable engineering. A study of lead solder use in
electronics, compared to alternatives based on bismuth, indium, and a silver/epoxy
mixture, raises questions of how additional mining activity should be evaluated from a
social perspective. The challenge of engineering the Everglades raises complex problems
arising from mutually exclusive stakeholder value systems in the context of a highly
valued, unpredictable, and complex resource regime. The mining example demonstrates
the difficulty of managing a major operation in a sensitive social and environmental
context, and balancing the needs of society as indicated through the market, and the
demands of activists.
Reading: Allenby, chapters 16-18.
Homework: You are operating a major mine in a developing country that is
managed responsibly but is also causing environmental changes in local ecosystems.
Write an op-ed (opinion-editorial) piece for your local newspaper defending your
operation against environmental activists who demand that you be shut down.
Week 14: The Engineer as Leader. Sustainable engineering requires many things of
professionals: commitment, respect for values and opinions that differ among themselves,
and from the ones we may hold, a willingness to understand and work with social,
cultural and environmental contexts. But it also requires that, as knowledgeable citizens
in an increasingly technological world, engineers function as leaders within their
institutions, communities, and society at large.
Reading: Allenby, chapter 19; Florman, chapters 7-11.
Homework: What will you be doing five years from graduation, and what skills
will you need to be doing it?